• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, July 7, 2025

Lindsay Kaplan, CEO and co-founder of Chief, “just about had a nervous breakdown” after asking ChatGPT to help her write something creative.

"Once I stripped it of its crutches — no rule of threes, no 'not x but y' language, no m-dashes, no choppy line breaks — it was totally unable to deliver anything coherent," she wrote on LinkedIn. “And then it kept going back to those devices over and over again.”

The absolute most insulting part, she wrote, happened when ChatGPT apologized to her for using the exact phrases and dashes her instructions demanded it must drop. She had to walk away from her computer after her heart began racing and found herself "all-cap yelling" at the generative artificial intelligence (GAI) technology.

"God I love good copywriters," Kaplan wrote, and later in the comments section replied to someone’s post about ChatGPT’s inability to create. It only regurgitates the garbage it takes in.

Reddit, Canva, Google’s parent Alphabet, Adobe and many others have made acquisitions of companies related to improving creativity for advertisers. For example, Reddit acquired Memorable AI to enhance advertiser performance by providing tools for improving creative guidance and ad generation.

Canva acquired Leonardo.AI, a platform for creating production-quality visual assets with generative AI, in 2024. Google acquired Alter, and Adobe acquired Rephrase AI, while OpenAI acquired Global Illumination.

Startups like NovelAI combined text and image AI generators and offers tools like a storyteller mode and a lorebook for creating and developing fictional worlds and characters.

"From broken websites to ineffective marketing copy, the hidden costs of AI mistakes are adding up, forcing businesses to bring in professionals to clean up the mess," according to Search Engine Journal. 

My concern here is that world-building and creativity are arts that humans should cherish.

Writing creatively is where ChatGPT and other GAI platforms fail, according to Kaplan. So, when you read articles that suggest GAI will come for your job, close the browser page and go about your day.

The MIT Technology Review published an article in 2024 that discusses AI's involvement in creative writing. Researchers studied how people use OpenAI's ChatGPT to write short stories, and the results showed it could be helpful but had its limitations.

Researchers focused on two metrics to measure creativity: usefulness and novelty. Usefulness demonstrated that the generated responses that could be used for publishable work. Novelty reflects the originality and uniqueness of the story.

About 293 participants were involved in this research. Each person was tasked with writing an eight-sentence story for a young adult audience focused on one of the three proposed topics. The topics included adventures in a jungle, different planets, and the open seas, according to the report.

Three groups participated. The first group had to create a unique story based on their own creativity. The second group was given the ability to generate a story idea through ChatGPT, and the final group was allotted up to five AI-generated ideas from ChatGPT. Of all participants who offered to use AI, 88.4% used the tool.

Then they reviewed their work before a group of 600 reviewers took a look at their writing.

Researchers determined writers with AI access demonstrated more creativity. Writers who exhibited more significant levels of creativity did not benefit from a creative boost from the tool, while those who were less creative did. Less creative writers saw an increase of 10 to 11% in creativity and 22 to 26% in enjoyable content.

It appears trouble comes when those with creativity rely too much on GAI, but those who have less can find a level playing field with access to AI tools. The study, conducted in July 2024, suggests that AI tools equalize storytelling.

Liliya N, project manager who worked at Epam, an IT services and consulting business, thought Kaplan’s post sounded like “a breakup with a tired ex.”

“As a visual artist (my side-gig), I am so with you -- Chat GPT is useless even when I specifically tell it what to correct,” Craig Matthews, pricing program expert, wrote in a post in response to Kaplan’s. “The results are always artificial. Good for generating conceptual ideas but absolutely terrible for finished product. That said, as a writer, I've had a slight degree of success with Chat GPT helping me -- but ONLY if I write detailed first and last drafts myself with a mindful eye on eliminating the AI clichés. The ‘not x but y’ is especially maddening!”

Tim Mehram, storyteller and content creator at Public Pixels Media, believes it’s a good reminder of AI’s limitations today.

How does one explain the input of the content if the output ends up being incomplete?

Robert Sean Davis, founder and chairman at Official Agency, completely disagreed.

“I'm in love with it,” he wrote. “The capacity to build upon creative original thought, and elevate evolving discussions to any degree the user can imagine is unprecedented. Plus, the persistence factor to adapt to what it learns and apply knowledge in thousands of undiscovered ways.”